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Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

One of the most enigmatic aspects of experience concerns time. Sincepre-Socratic times scholars have speculated about the nature of time,asking questions such as: What is time? Where does it come from? Where doesit go? The central proposal of The Structure of Time is that time, at base,constitutes a phenomenologically real experience. Drawing on findings inpsychology, neuroscience, and utilising the perspective of cognitivelinguistics, this work argues that our experience of time may ultimatelyderive from perceptual processes, which in turn enable us to perceiveevents. As such, temporal experience is a pre-requisite for abilities suchas event perception and comparison, rather than an abstraction based onsuch phenomena. The book represents an examination of the nature oftemporal cognition, with two foci: (i) an investigation into(pre-conceptual) temporal experience, and (ii) an analysis of temporalstructure at the conceptual level (which derives from temporal experience).

Table of contents

Acknowledgements ix

I. Orientation 1. The problem of time 3–11 2. The phenomenology of time 13–32 3. The elaboration of temporal concepts 33–37 4. The nature of meaning 39–56 5. The conceptual metaphor approach to time 57–77 6. A theory of word-meaning: Principled polysemy 79–104

III. Models for time 16. Time, motion and agency 201–210 17. Two complex cognitive models of temporality 211–226 18. A third complex model of temporality 227–236 19. Time in modern physics 237–249 20. The structure of time 251–254

Notes 255 References 269 Index 277

"Time belongs to the bedrock of human cognition. Beginning before birth andremaining for the most part below the horizon of consciousness, temporalcognition is a mystery not easily penetrated. The Structure of Time is anindispensable investigation, rich in theory and examples, into thephenomenology and the linguistics of the way we think about time." Mark Turner, Institute Professor, Case Western Reserve University

"This work is interesting, creative, thought-provoking, and timely (no punintended)" Wallace Chafe, University of California at Santa Barbara

"[...] thought provoking and inspiring. It is a valuable interdisciplinarysource for insight in several domains, including lexical semantics,conceptual metaphor theory, and cognitive science in the area of time." Thora Tenbrink, University of Bremen, Germany, on Linguist List 15-2430 (2004)